Is LeBron Even Peaking Yet?

It’s not every day Kobe Bryant (second from right) plays the the kind of amazed bystander usually seen only in early Spielberg movies.

When an NBA player has won three MVPs, a championship, a Finals MVP and a pair of Olympic gold medals, odds are he’s already playing at his peak. But that may not be the case with LeBron James, a terrifying prospect for teams still figuring out how to unseat him and the defending champion Miami Heat. Apart from his general statistical brilliance—he leads the league in player efficiency rating, and is fourth in scoring—James has made 49 of his last 65 shots, a stunning rate that’s enabled him to be the third player in history to score 30 points and shoot at least 60% in five straight games. “That’s 16 misses in all,” ESPN’s Tom Haberstroh points out. “There have been 49 instances this season when a player has missed at least 16 shots in a single game. Carmelo Anthony has eight of them; Kobe Bryant has seven; James Harden has two; Kevin Durant has two; James has none.”

It helped in Sunday’s eventual blowout win over the Los Angeles Lakers, it often looked like James was playing against a squad of narcoleptics. Ask Steve Nash,frequently left empty-handed trying to delay James in transition, or supposed defensive specialist Metta World Peace, who at one moment conceded a seven-point burst over two possessions. The casual relentlessness of James’s game even won applause from Kobe Bryant. “Perhaps the Lakers guard simply found the queries preferable to solicitations of his psychoanalysis of dour teammate Dwight Howard,” Ethan Skolnick writes for the Palm Beach Post. “Still, it was stunning to hear Bryant, famously stingy with compliments, lavish so many on a contemporary rival, not only indulging endless questions about James but even elaborating on initial answers.” By the end of the game, one could only wonder not whether James will capture his fourth MVP award, but by how wide a margin. (The Lakers, as usual, remained a slow-motion car crash in the model of the New York Jets, as the Journal’s Jason Gay writes.)

Apart from his record-setting pace, James has settled into a more likeable role as the best player in the league, not nearly as publicly concerned with winning a championship or “disproving the haters” as he might’ve been a few seasons ago. The Heat have looked far from invincible this season—their defense sometimes seems systematically susceptible, and they have a middling road record—but it’s hard to bet against a player so easily capable of bending the limitations of what should be expected on a basketball court. “Most figured the Heat would turn into a soap opera when three stars merged in one big market, yet the only recent drama came Sunday when Lil Wayne was (supposedly) ejected for making a threatening gesture at a fan,” writes Yahoo’s Eric Adelson. “That’s the drama in Miami. On a team of megastars and mega-egos, the Heat have turned into the most boring reality show in sports.” Not so much fun for the rest of the league, but we’re sure the Heat don’t mind.

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It’s nothing personal, really, that most headlines read “Nadal loses” rather than “Zeballos wins” after Horacio Zeballos defeated Rafael Nadal in Sunday’s VTR Open final. Consider the rarity of the clay-court final loss, just the fifth of Nadal’s career. Seven-month layoff or not, it also happened to a player decidedly less historically accomplished than Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic (the only others to hand him such a loss). After splitting two tiebreaks, Nadal’s serve was broken once in the final set—which was all Zeballos needed to complete the surprising upset, unforeseen even though Nadal was returning to the court for the first time since last summer’s Wimbledon. After breezing through the early rounds, the loss was a sobering reminder that Nadal’s knee is still ailing, and that there’s work yet to do before he can regain his previous form.

“Nadal turns 27 in June, smack in the middle of the French Open as the stars would have it,” Courtney Nguyen writes for Sports Illustrated. “He’s no longer the invincible kid who could barrel his way across any surface with abandon. I suspect he’s more aware of his physical limitations than ever, and with time less on his side than it was when he was 20, he’s wisely made adjustments.” A few more low level tournaments—the ATP 250 tournament on clay was the first he’d played since 2007—will follow before the serious bulk of his schedule is set to begin.

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Beginning with Title IX, gender equality in the sporting world has been a slow-but-steady moving train over the last 40 years. Imagine, though, how difficult it was for women to find equal footing before the 20th century was even halfway over. Edith Houghton, one of the first female scouts in Major League Baseball, passed away on Feb. 2 just eight days shy of her 101st birthday. A starting shortshop on an all-girls professional team by the age of 10, Houghton toured with her team across America and even to Japan. After serving in World War II, she returned home to ask the owner of the Philadelphia Phillies if she could become a scout—a position she held for six years before serving in the military during the Korean War.

“As it turns out, the scouting stint was the last time Houghton would be involved in baseball in an official capacity,” writes Yahoo’s Mark Townsend. “In total, she would sign fifteen players to contracts, and though none of her signees would earn the call to the big leagues, her impact on the organization had already been felt and her legacy as a pioneer and one of the game’s most important figures was already solidified.” Several of her mementos hang in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, should you ever make the trip.

UPDATE: Though it has been widely reported that Houghton was the first female scout, a Baseball Hall of Fame bio page points out that Bessie Largent scouted baseball before Houghton did.

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